Cake and Custom
by Tozette
Summary: In which Bethany has a crush, Merrill receives a cake and Isabela gives terrible (and excellent) advice. [Bethany Hawke/Merrill. Femslash. Written for a tumblr prompt.]


I took prompts for femslash on tumblr. This is the first one filled.

* * *

All Bethany had wanted was to bring Merrill her Maker-blighted bloody cake.

Cake.

From Bethany.

To Merrill.

It was a recipe of mother's, from Ferelden, from before they'd returned to Kirkwall. Before Leandra had become a noblewoman, before she'd lost a son, before -

Well, Bethany could hardly say it was from before everything had gone wrong. But Merrill was lonely and isolated out in the alienage and they both knew it, and Bethany...

Well, alright, so Bethany liked her a little bit. Probably more than she should. For such a sweet woman, Merrill had a hardness in her, a fascinating edge of something ancient and clever and sad, and her peculiar naivety let her view things with unexpected clarity.

Also she was terribly, terribly cute, and Bethany possibly - maybe (definitely) - wanted to do awful, terrible things with her, things that would make her flush and pant and grunt with every sweet exhaled breath. It was kind of getting to be a bit of a problem, just because of how, er, _obvious_ it was.

Marian didn't know, of course - and thank the Maker, honestly - because Marian existed in a constant state of altruistic but self-absorbed obliviousness.

The others...

Varric's senses for this sort of thing were too sharp, and more than once he'd drawled quietly, "What's going on between you and Daisy?" And given her knowing eyes when she disavowed all knowledge.

"A cake? I don't think Merrill goes for the subtle approach, sweetness," Isabela had told her, when they'd run into each other while Bethany was collecting ingredients. Isabela had bumped a hip against hers companionably and slung an arm around her waist.

"Have you tried..." and here Bethany was so prepared, perfectly braced, for some hideous vulgar euphemism, but Isabela didn't even bother. "...licking her ears? These elves, they're _verrry_ sensitive," she purred.

Bethany had been embarrassed, but not quite so embarrassed she missed the arch look Isabela threw at Fenris's stiff back. He was pretending he couldn't hear them, but one of his long ears twitched, and -

Ew. That was high on the list of things Bethany hadn't needed to know about.

Still, only Isabela just went around _licking_ people. As far as Bethany knew, cake was a perfectly acceptable gift. And if she was going to enjoy sitting there watching Merrill lick butter cream off her fingers like a contented cat, well -

- well, Isabela, of all people, could hardly judge her.

That was all Bethany was really anticipating, honestly. A chat, a bit of cake, watching Merrill a little too intently. It was all in good fun, surely: two apostates catching up in a run down and slightly vermin-infested alienage shack. Nothing to it.

But that was not at _all_ what actually happened.

Why anybody was looking for her sister in the alienage, Bethany did not know. But Marian was well known: tall, pale-skinned, dark haired, and... well, actually, she _did_ look a lot like Bethany.

And she was involved in so many shady deals that Bethany didn't really think about it when a hard-faced dwarf stepped in to ask her questions.

"Are you Hawke?"

"Yes?" Bethany paused. "Well, yes, but -" and that was about as far as she'd been allowed to get before there were elves fleeing for their lives and weapons being flung around haphazardly.

An arrow whizzed past Bethany's ear. She cursed, ducking and rolling and swiping her staff off her back. "I'm not _that_ Hawke!" she yelled, but if the carta dwarves even heard her -

There was blood on the dirt, a sound like a thunderclap, and something exploded.

Maker's breath, Bethany thought, smacking somebody over the head with her staff while she called up a fireball, they had a blood mage.

The next spell made fire rain down, crashing upon them with such force that it shook the ground. Elves screamed. Bethany would feel guilty about that - later.

Distantly, she heard Merrill's voice.

"Ohh," she was saying fretfully, "No, I wouldn't do _that_, you - oh! Oh, dear." There was a crackle and a scream, and then Merril's voice again: "Bethany!"

Bethany spun and found there was a rage abomination spilling upward, rearing back from the body of the blood mage, tall and terrible and burning. Close by, another pulled itself from somebody else's body.

"Maker's _blood_," she muttered. If only Hawke _was_ here.

A cone of cold sprang up out of nowhere, ice sizzling against one of the abominations, and Merrill was suddenly there, tiny and fierce, with flashing eyes and a shrill curse on her tongue and -

Bethany smiled. One down.

Yeah, they had this.

* * *

"That was very sudden," Merrill said, looking around at the debris of the alienage. Bethany followed her gaze, but couldn't work up the same cheer. "Do people do that often?"

"What? Mistake me for my sister?" Bethany asked a little drily. "Not really, no."

"Oh, is that what it was? I thought perhaps you were involved in something terribly exciting. You know, investigating mysterious deaths, or -"

"Merrill," sighed Bethany, huffing out a breath of gentle laughter. "I can't tell if you've been spending too much time with Varric, or too much time with my sister."

"Oh," said Merrill, sounding very disappointed. "Isabela, actually," she admitted.

Well, that was a third option.

"All these people," Bethany said with a sigh. "We should help them put their homes in order."

Merrill tilted her head. "They won't let you," she predicted in a voice that was lilting and sweet, but not particularly happy. "They don't trust humans."

Bethany's eyes flicked from Merrill to the other elves. "I suppose not," she said slowly.

Merrill glanced at her. "Why should they?" she asked. Presumably that was a rhetorical question. Bethany hoped it was, because she didn't have an answer.

There was silence for a while, until Merrill spoke again.

"You have a lovely singing voice, you know," she said, kicking awkwardly at the dirt while Bethany gingerly searched the bodies' pockets. Marian would have done a more thorough job, but Marian also didn't mind rifling through dead men's underpants.

"What?" Bethany had definitely not been singing. She straightened finally.

"I heard you the other day, when we were in Hightown. It doesn't sound anything like my mother's," Merrill added, almost apologetically, "but it's much better than Keeper Marethari's."

"...thank you," said Bethany. She scooped up her fallen bag and followed Merrill as she picked her way through the bodies and debris back to her house.

"I swear," Merrill said, stepping into the entryway, "it's clean sometimes. Just never when people are here."

Bethany laughed. "You saw Gamlen's place," she reminded her. "It needed shovelling, not sweeping. None of us is very good at housework."

The cake, when Bethany pulled it out, was horribly squished, although the greasepaper she'd wrapped it in had prevented it from becoming dirtied.

"Oh, look, you dropped your lunch," Merrill said sadly, examining it. "You poor thing, you'll be terribly hungry now, won't you?"

"No, it's all right," sighed Bethany. "I, um," her voice stuck a little, which felt strange, but she persevered. "I made it for you, actually."

Merrill looked at her with huge eyes. "You did? No one's ever made me a cake before," she said, peering more closely. Then she paused. "Oh," she said. "Oh, oh, this is a human thing, isn't it?" she asked excitedly.

"What?" Bethany said.

"Oohh, Isabela told me about this," she said, and then with no further explanation she lunged forward and kissed Bethany on the mouth.

It wasn't much of a kiss, just the movement of chapped lips rubbing against hers and the cool softness of Merrill's skin.

Bethany ...blinked.

"Oh, dear," said Merrill fretfully when she pulled back. "Did I not do it right? Oh, I knew I was going to mess this up."

"Mess..." Bethany had a sneaking suspicion that was slowly turning into a certainty. "Merrill," she said slowly, "did Isabela tell you to do that?"

Which was how Bethany found out that Isabela had managed to convince Merrill that a gift of cake was how humans declared their affections to one another.

'Affections,' Bethany learned, was by no means the description Isabela had given.

She covered her eyes with her hands and muttered terrible things about the evil pirate queen.

"Varric said that you were supposed to kiss..." Merrill paused. "Are you going to be all right?" she asked Bethany. "Do you need to sit down? Ohh, where did I put the chair?"

She disappeared and returned with a second chair, which had been somewhere next to her broken mirror. Bethany didn't want to know.

"So," Merrill said after a few moments of awkward silence. "You don't... Oh, dear," she said again. "Sorry."

Bethany peaked out from between her fingers. Merrill wasn't blushing, but she did look very uncomfortable.

"I thought -" she began, at the same time as Bethany said, "Maybe -"

They both stopped.

There was silence.

Merrill covered a little laugh with her hand.

Bethany relaxed a little.

"You should," Bethany paused for a second. Then, all quiet confidence, she kissed Merrill. "You should tell me if this isn't okay," she said, drawing back just far enough to talk. They shared breath for a half-second, and then Bethany leaned in again.

Kissing was slick and warm, a little sloppy. Not entirely comfortable, but pleasant. She was very aware that there was somebody's blood on her knee and soot on her forehead.

Merrill pulled away after a few seconds.

"Oh," she blinked. She licked her lips. "No, quite okay. A bit _wet_, isn't it? Is it always so wet? With humans, I mean."

Bethany gave her a chagrined look. "I'm... I'm not sure," she admitted. It wasn't like growing up an apostate constantly on the run had really given her a lot of opportunity to get close to strangers. She didn't... kiss. In general.

Annnd _now_ she was blushing.

Merrill smiled at her, a little shy, a lot wicked. "_We_ do it like this," she told her, peering up at her through her dark lashes.

This time Bethany's lips caught on the dry parts of Merrill's, and Merrill's tongue rubbed along the inside of her lip, tentative against the sensitive parts of her mouth. Merrill tangled her long pale fingers in Bethany's dark hair and tugged gently.

For a few breathless moments, everything was sudden, nervous; a heart-pounding immediacy that Bethany hadn't expected. She had no idea what she was doing, but everything in her body switched on all at once, and a dull ache coiled low and tight in her belly.

"Okay," she mumbled against Merrill's mouth. "We should definitely do it your way."

"Oh, good," Merrill agreed. She clapped her hands excitedly and then pulled Bethany away, down further into her tiny messy house, and Bethany was almost too distracted by the jut of her hips and the softness of her hands to notice where they were going.

"Do your people lick each other's ears, too?" she wondered cheerfully, kicking the bedroom door closed behind them.

* * *

Reviews are welcome, although complaining about the femslash is generally discouraged. *thumbs up*


End file.
